Before I Was a Gazan

By Naomi Shihab Nye

I was a boy
and my homework was missing,
paper with numbers on it,
stacked and lined,
I was looking for my piece of paper,
proud of this plus that, then multiplied,
not remembering if I had left it
on the table after showing to my uncle
or the shelf after combing my hair
but it was still somewhere
and I was going to find it and turn it in,
make my teacher happy,
make her say my name to the whole class, before everything got subtracted
in a minute
even my uncle
even my teacher
even the best math student and his baby sister who couldn’t talk yet.
And now I would do anything
for a problem I could solve.